Tag: home economics

Looking Down The Road

Whether you’re driving, writing a book, planning your financial future, or cooking a new recipe, looking down the road can prevent a lot of problems. Remember learning to drive? Most new drivers focus just in front of the hood leaving every approaching danger out of their field of vision. Watching them attempt to navigate is terrifying.

The stakes aren’t as high when you’re cooking a new recipe, but the end result may be frightening if you’re out of a key ingredient or fail to temper the eggs. And it can slow down the process if some things aren’t prepped in advance. This can sabotage a timeline that would put everything on the table at the same time.

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When I was in 7th grade, you had to take either Home Economics (Family and Consumer Science) or Science. The year prior, my family had dinner at the Home Ec teacher’s house. After we arrived, she sent her husband to the store to get some ingredient she didn’t have. It was a lengthy wait for the food and none of it was done at the same time. When it came time to choose a class the next year, I chose Science.

And I practice the backward timeline across all endeavors. Yes, it seems cumbersome and like a waste of time when you’re in a hurry to get started, but I promise it’s worth it. It’s the equivalent of looking down the road when you’re driving.

With cooking, this means reading the recipe and compiling an ingredient and utensil list prior to going to the store. If you’re planning a whole meal, you’ll also want to go backward from serving time to make a plan for when to put each dish in the oven or on top of the stove.

I have a single oven, so I have to factor in oven temperature and cooking time. Some dishes can be cooked at a lower temperature for longer without affecting the quality. That means I can adjust time and temp to cook two items at the same time so that they are both ready to serve simultaneously.

There’s a bit of an art to making these adjustments because the more you put in the oven, the longer it takes everything to cook. And sometimes, you’ll need to switch a dish from the top rack to the bottom in the middle of cooking so that it will cook evenly or brown properly. Don’t worry if you don’t know exactly how to do this the first time. Just use your senses and check things more often.

Making a plan that anticipates and orchestrates these adjustments will make cooking easier. You can make a visible timeline or a list – whatever works for you. And it can all be in your head if you like a memory challenge.

Last Thanksgiving, I had a clogged drain that required two plumbers in the kitchen while I was cooking. I couldn’t use the sink at all. To say that was distracting is an understatement. But I had a timeline in my head and managed to get everything done and on the table at the same time except for one item I totally forgot until everything else was done.

Luckily, it was a quick item I was doing for the kids so there was no disaster. The adults were able to fill their plates while I finished up. I’ll also say my execution was less than ideal, but if I had not had a plan, it could have been a total chaos!

I’m not cooking today. I’m working on other things here at Cooking2Thrive. I still have a plan. I may get interrupted. There may be unanticipated delays. I may have to pivot. But it will be calm. Chaos will not reign. And progress will be made.

That’s the advantage to looking down the road.

I Love Systems!

The Benefits of Cooking – Part 3: The Lessons

When I was in junior high school, all girls were required to take a class called Home Economics and all boys were required to take Wood Shop. Well, to be truthful, I never took Home Ec because I opted to take an extra science course instead.

What did I need Home Ec for? I was told that what they did in that class was learn to cook and sew. I already knew how to do those things. My grandmother taught me to sew when I was 9. My mother was delegating her baking to me even before that. I was ready to learn something new. I was off to take a new science class in which I excelled. Why? I was well prepared. All those lessons I learned in the kitchen had prepared me for science, math, and process thinking.

As we watch our kids become less and less skilled in these three areas, I often wonder how closely related it is to the fact that many of us no longer cook. Perhaps we should consider getting the kids back in the kitchen so they’ll be better prepared for school.

Double a recipe and your daughter will quickly come to understand why adding and multiplying fractions are critical skills. Without understanding common denominators, how can she know that 1 1/4 cups plus 1 1/4 cups equals 2 1/2 cups?  But once she has learned these conversions while cooking, there will be no need to resist expanding on that knowledge in math class. Certainly the familiar – “Why do I need to learn this, I’ll never use it in real life?” – argument will be nullified. Want to help her even more, have her make one and a half recipes of cookies. The division required provides an opportunity to use even more advanced math skills.

Throw some salt in a pot of water that you need to hurry up and boil. Your son just learned that you can lower the boiling point of water by adding salt. Put some baking soda in lemon juice and let him watch a frothing chemical reaction that doesn’t threaten to destroy your house or poison its occupants.

There are endless chemistry and physics lessons inherent in cooking. You can point them out, or just let your children learn without knowing they’re learning as they watch solid fats melt into liquids, lemon juice curdle cream, or heat cause baking soda to release carbon dioxide and make a cupcake rise. Even if you don’t specifically discuss the science behind these reactions while you’re cooking, you are creating a repository of knowledge that will make these concepts seem familiar when it’s time to take a chemistry class. This knowledge will help remove the fear of being in the lab and lay the foundation of curiosity for a formula that explains how the acids in baking powder react to create carbon dioxide.

If you have a child who wants all the food to look pretty, you can focus on the art and design lessons in cooking. Mix red and yellow food coloring and the kids can immediately see the resulting orange color. Explore scale and proportion by layering cakes. Experiment with different piping tips, brushes, or “found” tools to create texture in frosting, cookies, or crackers. Build houses, make dough people, or create an entire edible village. For this lesson, innovation and creativity are your guides. Let the ideas flow freely. Feel the excitement that collaboration brings when one idea sparks another.

No matter what lesson you’re attempting to learn in the kitchen, you will learn about process, procedure, and order of operations. If you begin without any plan and ignore a certain order of operations, you will not get the results you expect or want. That doesn’t mean you have to follow every recipe to the letter, or that you must know exactly what you’re going to cook for dinner before you walk into the kitchen. It means you must think through and understand the process. Process thinking helps you to recognize that what you do now should be determined by what you want to happen next, and next, and next…until the end of the process – a finished dish or a coordinated meal. Of course this type of thinking is beneficial in all areas of life. We reach a specified goal with much greater ease when we understand that today’s decision can be determined by our priorities for what will happen next, and next, and next, then allow the process to support us.

My grandmother didn’t talk about process, she just instructed me to always read through an entire recipe before I ever started to get out ingredients, pans, or bowls. There were several reasons for this. One was to make sure that all the ingredients were available in the kitchen. One was so I would only get out what I needed and make less of a mess in her kitchen. One was so that I wouldn’t dump dry ingredients and liquids together until it was time to do so and create a batter that had to be thrown away. She couldn’t stand to waste food. She also wanted to make sure I would properly preheat the oven and prepare the proper baking dish in advance. She didn’t like to waste time either. Once I was competent to prepare individual dishes, I carried this same process thinking into creating a timeline that allowed me to create a coordinated meal in which my all dishes were ready for the dining table at the same time and piping hot.

As a project manager, I have used the reverse timeline to great success when handling complex, detailed, and deadline driven assignments. Communicating instructions based on what must happen one or two steps past that specific instruction streamlines the process and narrows the margin for error. Understanding the process also allows me to be more swift and flexible in finding solutions to problems because I have a clear understanding of what is critical and what is not in achieving a desired result. These are skills I desire in all employees. These are skills I developed in the kitchen before I reached junior high. I simply built on them in secondary school, college, and at work.

I suspect the boys in my junior high were learning a great deal about process thinking in Wood Shop too. If they failed to allow for the thickness of a piece of wood in their overall measurements, they would not cut boards to the proper length when building a cabinet. If they didn’t understand how the equipment worked, they could lose an appendage. I’m certain that these skills serve them well whether they became bankers, writers, carpenters, or electricians.

We worry so much about declining standardized test scores and how to fix the schools. In spite of much discussion, we have made little headway. Perhaps the solution to improvement is quite simple, and possibly delicious. Get the kids in the kitchen and get things cooking!

 

 

 

The Benefits of Cooking – Part 1: The Food